Theodore Winthrop

Major Theodore Woolsey Winthrop (September 22, 1828 – June 10, 1861) was a writer, lawyer, and world traveller. He was one of the first Union officers killed in the American Civil War.

Biography

Winthrop was born in New Haven, Connecticut, and is a descendant of several prominent Colonial families. Through his father, he was descended from Governor John Winthrop, and through his mother, from theologian Jonathan Edwards, as well as early settlers George (Joris) Woolsey and Thomas Cornell.

He graduated in 1848 from Yale University, where his uncle Theodore Dwight Woolsey was President, and he was a member of the Phi chapter of the Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity. He traveled for a year in Great Britain and Europe and then through the United States, settling in Staten Island in the 1850s. After contributing to periodicals, short sketches, and stories, which attracted little attention, Winthrop enlisted in the 7th Regiment, New York State Militia, an early volunteer unit of the Federal Army that answered President Abraham Lincoln's call for troops in 1861. He wrote a popular essay about the experience titled "Our March to Washington." He was appointed Major and soon became an aide-de-camp to Major General Benjamin Butler, commander of the Department of Virginia headquartered at Fort Monroe. Winthrop had long been an abolitionist, along with his younger brother William Winthrop, who later became the nation's leading authority on military law. Butler credited Winthrop with first formulating the policy that automatically conferred freedmen status on escaped slaves who entered into Union Army-held territory.